October Reveries

Tuesday, October 13, 2026 – Orlando, Florida

October has always been a difficult month for me. Its arrival brings a chill that has little to do with the weather; before the calendar has turned its first few pages, I can already feel the weight of memory settling in.

Whether I choose to dwell on the past or not, October brings its anniversaries and birthdays marching back into view. The month belongs to people who are still here, people I have lost touch with, and people who are gone.

Both of my parents, for instance, were born in October. My father, who died in 1965, when I was too young to remember him, was born on the 4th. My mother, who died half a century later, was born on the 17th. Those two dates carry different kinds of sorrow, but both weigh heavily on me—especially my mother’s birthday.

My best friend from the old Coral Estates Park neighborhood in Westchester, Mark Prieto, was born on October 9, 1965. We made an unlikely pair. Mark was the comic extrovert, gifted at drawing Mad magazine-style cartoons and imitating characters from television and the movies; I was the quiet, shy kid who could nevertheless be funny when the circumstances were right. I last saw him in the summer of 1979, a year after Mom and I had moved to a brand-new townhouse in Fontainebleau Park. Mark rode his bike all the way from SW 11th Street and 102nd Avenue to tell me that he, his mother, and his younger sister, Leslie, were moving to Michigan to live with his mother’s fiancé. Afterward, we tried to keep the friendship alive through old-fashioned letters. But school, adolescence, and the growing demands of our separate lives got in the way, and by sometime in 1981, the correspondence had sputtered into silence.

I do not deliberately wallow in misery, nor do I spend October circling these dates on the calendar and summoning sadness on cue. But I am who I am: solitary by nature, reflective almost to a fault, and sensitive to the echoes people leave behind. I may not seek out these anniversaries, yet they have a way of finding me. A date appears, a memory stirs, and suddenly the past feels less like a distant country than a room whose door has quietly swung open.

In my stories about Jim Garraty, I have tried, in my own way, to memorialize all three of them. Jim, too, lost his father before he had the chance to know him. He mourns the mother who raised him as a single parent, carrying her influence long after her death. And, unlike me, he still has a connection to a best friend named Mark—a character who deliberately resembles the friend I “lost” to the mists of time in the Land of Ago. Fiction cannot return the people the years have taken from us, but it can give their shadows a place to linger, speak, laugh, and remain part of the story.

Perhaps that is what October asks of me—not that I surrender to grief, but that I pause and listen to what memory is trying to say. The month may arrive carrying its familiar chill, yet it also reminds me that love, friendship, and loss do not vanish simply because time moves on. Some people remain with us in photographs and remembered voices; others find their way into the pages we write. Either way, they are not entirely gone.